Dead Man's Plea

Description

I'll provide you the information you ask for, <name>. But more pressing matters are at hand.

My beloved wife has been taken prisoner by Rivendare's undead scum.

I strongly objected to her joining the Argent Dawn's foolish crusade, yet that's not of importance anymore. You must finish what I attempted to do, you must rescue Ysida from the clutches of the Baron!

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Comments

Comment by osuracnaes

Attempted this with a Protection warrior (me), MC/BWL-geared mage and warlock, a priest and a not-so-great paladin. There should be no breaks - constant pulling and fighting is required. We got through the gauntlet with about 10 minutes left, and it took about 15 minutes to clear the abominations, Rammstein, the skeleton spawns, and Baron. So aim to start pulling the abominations with 15 minutes left and if you keep the pace up pulling them you should be good.

Comment by chaosmonkey

This is the infamous "45-minute Strat" run that many have tried and few have beaten. It's part of the Dungeon Set 2 (Tier 0.5) upgrade quest chain, so it's appropriately difficult.

In order to pull this off successfully, you need to know how to cut the right corners:

1. you do not need (or want) to pull every group of mobs that you would normally pull on a Strat dead run. Walk around every group you possibly can. Battle the fewest number of enemies possible.

2. do not loot anything (except - maybe! - for the minibosses). You do not have the time to roll for random greens, but more importantly, if it takes you 3s to loot a mob and you loot 100 over the course of the run, that's 5 full minutes used. The timer is too tight to justify 5 minutes of looting.

3. start the next pull before the current mob is dead. The DPS players (specifically rogues and hunters) should basically have no downtime throughout the run. The only breaks you should take are for the casters to drink up, and even then you should only drop out of combat long enough for them to start.

4. most importantly and most obviously, remember to concentrate your firepower on a single target before moving onto the next one. That actually applies to every group, but people seem to forget easily.

Unfortunately a good part of this run is luck. With that said, best of luck to you. :)

Mage and hunter went into barons room, and pet obviously ran off to kill baron by himself (Gotta love pet bugs) So door closed right in front of me (warrior) and pally. Mage and hunter died, and we were like oh noes :D. Well baron didn't kill Ysida (probably since whole group didn't get killed) And with 3 minutes left on the timer we ressed Mage and Hunter.

Attacked Baron with a good 2½ minutes to go. Took him down np.

So what i'm saying is, this quest is not too hard, if it is doable with 4 ppl, including 1 full wipe + corpse run, and a screwup at baron.

Needless to say, Mage and Hunter had pretty good gear (Hell my gear isn't that bad, and im arms specced, even tho I was at 15% in damage meter, and they were both at about 40ish)

Also paladin had nice gear, had around 5,5k mana (almost never went under 4k tho :P) Since the dps output was huge, mobs went down really fast.

btw, didn't tank, I just went full out dps shouting + hamstring stuff to let mage and hunter do their job. (Bosses I did tank tho)

oh one more thing, after we killed bosses at the ziggurats, we continued while mage ran in to clear them. Saved about 1½-2mins per zig.

Yeah that's about it. We did it the 'normal' way, meaning Baroness -> Nerub'enkan -> Maleki -> Ramstein -> Baron. (skipped magistrate and all unnecessary mobs). I must say, we didn't even hurry that much. I personally didn't think this would go this easy, But I guess the dps was just too awesome.

Good luck if anyone is still going to try this.

Comment by FilipeToscano

> Unfortunately a good part of this run is luck

Good players make their own luck. Having reached Exalted by doing Strat 45 runs (with ZG blues) with ~10 minutes to spare, it boils down to:

1) Group buildup. Tank and primary Healer are the obvious. We mostly opted for a two mage team, with some melee DPS to wrap things up. Warrior will duel wield most of the time, using 1H+Shield when fighting multiple mobs and/or mob type.

2) Crowd-control. Priests are always healing, so they'll never shackle. But having two Frost Novas for spamming during four mob pulls is critical. Three are pinned to the floor, allowing the group to kill one mob that is extracted from the group.

3) Fast pulling (and counterspell from Mage), but one that allows a slight pause between kill/re-entering combat: this allows drinking (even if of small amounts). Most pulls are from the Warrior, but some are better if they are sheep pulls,

4) Fixed pulling order. You aren't pulling all of the mobs, and we had our mob pulls numbered. Our path is different than the one below, but it gives you a good idea of the notion of mob avoidance.http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Baron45.jpg

5) Use line-of-sight to move mobs to kill locations. Depends on your pathing.

6) Mage solos a Ziggurat. Once the group kills Baroness Anastari, four players continue to clear to Nerub while a mage solos the zigg. Mage will solo the trap, while the group is killing Nerub, and then solo the zigg. Mage will solo zigg on Maleki while group is clearing to the abomination gates. This buys us time.

6) Cleaner. Put the loot in FFA, and have a enchanter shift-click on everything. Each one of us made ~70g minimum per run by disenchanting everything that was looted.

This quest is one of the greatest challenges in the game. It has more to do with skill and teamplay, than with gear.

Comment by Infamous

2 mages1 bear1 shaman1 priestkilled the baron with 12mins left on the timer. 45mins is a decent amount of time for you to do this in. Just skip magistrate (or I think you can still kill him before you start the timer if you come in the front gates not sure anymore about that), don't wipe after the gates, don't wipe more then once, and move at a continous rate you should be fine.

Comment by kreghx

The coordinates are 24,88

Comment by Marn

There's also a quicker way to skip some of the mobs there. Before entering Stratholme, have some Limited Invulnerability potions with you at the ready. After killing the last of the minibosses, pop them & run as fast as you can, past the gate and into the abomination bit. Die there, and then once the mobs have lost their aggro on you, reset as quickly as possible. I have done this with a friend, and it worked as long as you position yourself carefully so as not to draw aggro again when your shaman / soulstoned resser has come back to life.

Comment by mattous

Completing this quest also gives you 1000 reputation with the Argent Dawn

Comment by adashiel

Keep in mind you don't have to kill the Baron within the 45 minutes. You just have to engage him. Unless you're critically short on time, get buffed, your cooldowns up, and to full health and mana before starting it up. After all, no matter how much time you have left you only get one shot at him if you want complete the quest.

Comment by Nyito

It would now appear that she will not die even if the timer expires. I first encountered this when farming AD rep on my 70 tankadin, I took a long AFK break and failed, if by a slim margin, engaging the Baron about 15 seconds after the timer expired, but she lived and I got the extra 300 AD rep. The second time through I purposely let the timer expire and didn't kill him until a good 15 minutes after it had expired, and lo and behold, she still lived again.

Comment by Nema

I'm doing this quest now on my druid, in order to reach 3000 quests before Wrath comes out, i dunno if it's possiable but i'm gonna try anyway :)))

needless to say this quest is really easy for T6 geared ppl, yet i have done it pre TBC on my warr and it wasn't that hard, keep in mind that this quest was inntded for ppl that didn't do MC/BWL at the time (which was possiable and was cleared when this quest chain came out) anyway in order to complete this quest you need to have full Blue set (or better) on all grp members and at least all grp members on this step of quest chain having the upgrades, if u ahve this it will be tight to do, but doable. not relevnt anymore tho :P

Comment by raca08

You get an additional 300 reputation for Ysida surviving regardless of whether you have the quest or not.

Comment by cryptoengineer

Some notes on soloing this for Loremaster. I found it pretty hard to figure out what to do from the previous posts.

I avoided Strat while levelling; I just didn't like the instance much. But trying to finish Loremaster, it was either get a raid together to run ZA, or solo Strat.

My toon is a lvl 80 Pally. He worked in his alternate spec, Retadin. He's reasonably well geared, mostly ilvl 200 stuff.

Main points:

At lvl 80, your aggro radius is tiny. You can walk pretty close to the mobs without aggro. Edge your way around groups, or wait till traffic opens a gap and dash through. This really speeds things up.

Doing this, you will occasionally get a swarm of very low level nuisance mobs coming from crates near the edges of the road. Take them out without AoE to avoid aggroing the others. For me, Retribution Aura did the trick.

At this level, none of the bosses are challenging, so I won't go into detail on the fights. What's more difficult is the occasional aggroing of a group of trash. I found AoE very useful when that happened, as well as being able to self heal. The occasions where that was required were far enough apart that I could probably have just used potions. Some of the mobs will web you, and having a trinket or other means of removing movement problems helps.

If you do aggro a trash mob or two, don't try to run away; as they follow you they pick up more trash. Deal with it on the original site, preferrably without AoE.

Route:

Strat is divided by a series of gates. Some open to a touch. Some require the Key to the City. The gate to the final boss on this quest opens after taking out 3 previous minibosses.

The gate to the NE (right) of the main entrance, heading directly into Festival Lane, is locked and you will have to go around it. Work your way clockwise around the block facing you as you come in. You will have three sets of double gates, first going from Kings Square into Market Row, from MR into Festival Lane, and from FL to Elder Square. None require a key. When you're between the double gates there will be a swarm of rats or other low level mobs; AoE is useful here.

Once you're through to Elder Square, kill Magistrate Barthilas, the first miniboss. He drops the Key to the City, which you need for subsequent gates. Head through the north one, into The Gauntlet.

The Gauntlet contains 3 alcoves with 'zuggurats', smallish pyramidal buildings (green areas on the second map). Each holds a mini boss, which you need to kill. Moving around this area without aggroing some trash is probably impossible, so be prepared to take out groups when you have to.

Once all 3 minibosses are dead, the gate to the final area, Slaughter Square, will open.

SS is patrolled by about 15 Abominations. Clear all of them out, and the door of the final ziggurat will open, and out will come another, somewhat higher level named Abomination. Kill him, and deal with the low level zombies and skels that come from the side.

The door then opens again. Go in, deal with the 3-4 trash just inside.

This leaves just the final boss, Baron Rivendare, who is guarding Ysida, the prisoner you are after. Kill him, and she is liberated. Talk to her, get her quest and item, and you're done.

Comment by fitz

This quest did not count for Loremaster of Kalimdor

Comment by sinistar

FYI this is not part 3 in a chain, there's quite a bit before it. So if you are looking for 'easy' AD rep, forget it. If you click on the questgiver and some of the other quests he starts you can find a comment that links out the whole chain.

Comment by Xivilaii

hmm, i cant see the problem, i usually have 30 min left after clearing the whole instance and killing baron:panyhow, this questchain is easily attainable, just check for the item u need to turn in to deliana at AH every now and then.